SHAVE
Severe Hazards Analysis & Verification Experiment NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed - Experimental Warning Program

to provide high-resolution verification data for the National Weather Radar Testbed's multi-purpose phased array radar to use the high-resolution verification data in the development of techniques for probabilistic warnings of severe thunderstorms, to evaluate the performance of multi-sensor, multi-radar severe weather algorithms, to associate changes in hail size and wind damage distributions with storm evolution, and to enhance climatological information about severe storm threats in the United States.

The high spatial and temporal resolution of the dataset collected during the project will facilitate the development of decision-making tools that improve forecasts and warnings of severe thunderstorms and tornadoes, and pave the way for improvements to the historical severe storms database. The project runs approximately from mid-May through mid-August of every year.

Real-time severe weather analysis tools from the WDSS-II system are used to enhance data collection via verification telephone calls and internet multimedia news sources. The WDSS-II products are available throughout the contiguous 48 states on a daily basis, allowing data collection throughout the summer and minimizing the number of "down days". These remote verification efforts can begin immediately following a storm's passage at any given point.

Data are collected by a team of University of Oklahoma meteorology students working closely with scientists from the NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory/Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies. SHAVE is an experiment being conducted in the NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed as part of the Experimental Warning Program by the NSSL/CIMMS Severe Weather Warning Applications and Technology Transfer (SWAT) group.

SHAVE and NWS reports for a storm in Lac qui Parle County, MN on 27 July 2006